Pokémon and Sacred Gold

Off Topic What Else Are You Playing?
1

Keeping myself with Pokémon and Sacred.

Pokémon

Playing order:
First time playing the Pokémon series. -
LeafGreen (Vanilla) > Emerald (Hoenn DEX ROMhack) > HeartGold (Refined Gold ROMhack) > Black 1 (Unova DEX ROMhack)

Experience:
Love the series.

  • Despite being old games, there’s a decent amount of mechanical depth with EVs, although you can usually just over level your character and steamroll through the game.
  • I loved the world design and exploration aspect of the Gen 3 and Gen 4. HM based exploration was awesome. Gen 5 had neat designs, but the overall world design is bad, it’s pretty linear.
  • Loved Gen 4 having an overworld sprite for your follower Pokémon.
  • Item discovery is also interesting. You need to pay attention to the NPCs.
  • Post-game for all the games (except Emerald) was very entertaining.
  • Since I wasn’t sure whether or not I’ll revisit the games, I had a huge roster of Pokémon (13-20) in each game. It made leveling them up pretty tedious, but I didn’t mind too much.
  • TMs and Held Items concept was entertaining to explore.
  • OSTs were God Tier. Route 3 LeafGreen, Route 113 Emerald, and Ho-oH summoning theme HeartGold are my favorites.

Still have Pokémon: Platinum left. I’ll play it after a while. Pokémon Black sort of burned me out, in hindsight I should’ve played Gen 4 after Gen 5, the former was hands down better in every regard.

HeartGold and LeafGreen are my favorite. HG despite being an amazing experience has its flaws. For instance, I didn’t like Johto trainer teams being made up of so many Kanto Pokémon, I realize that Johto has a much smaller roster, but there was no reason to lock Murkrow or Pupitar behind Kanto (ROMHack fixed this btw and had a much more sensible distribution). Similarly, Skarmory is supposed to be Gen 2, but you won’t realize this since it’s barely used by trainers. Similarly, I didn’t like Silver’s story being locked behind a limited time event. ROMhack allowed me to play it, but I was shocked when I discovered that the base game didn’t have it. Also, didn’t like HeartGold making Ho-oH capture mandatory to the story progression. No complaints about LeafGreen except for the roaming Pokémon IV bug.


Sacred: Gold

Same with Sacred, first time playing it. I’m absolutely loving it. Playing as a Fireball Battlemage, 32 hours in.

Experience (Thus far):

  • I’ve only just reached Act 3 but I have done about 114 side quests. I like the quest design, very innovative for its time. I actually missed a quest from even appearing because I failed to see the quest giver NPC. Been saving frequently after that. Don’t hate it despite that, keeps me on my toes. Only bad thing about the quest design is that it’s very easy to bug out quests, I discovered this when I accidentally bugged out a side quest where the quest NPC’s model was invisible thereby making me unable to finish the quest.
  • The thing that I love the most is that at the beginning, each class begins in a different part of the starting area, and you can actually access those areas even while not playing as the relevant class.
  • I also loved the unique set of classes available. I started a game with each class just to see their spawn points but ultimately decided upon Battlemage. Daemon interested me the most since its spawn point is the most different one. But, I figured I’d save that class for an eventual second playthrough. Dwarf and Vampiress also seem like interesting classes.
  • World design is absolutely fantastic. The devs don’t restrict you too much. I discovered two dragons through pure accident. First one was during normal exploration. The second dragon showed up while I was taking an off beat track to guide an important NPC to safety. Killed both.
  • Itemization and Skill system are also unique and engaging.

Sacred is doing an amazing job of keeping me busy.

2

That’s where you’re wrong! If you’re only focused on the story, it’s pretty linear, but since it’s the first generation to make HMs optional (except Cut one time, and Fly for convenience’s sake), you’re going to want to explore once you get those HMs because they open alternate passageways to new extensions of old routes. There’s a side route off Route 1 that requires Surf and loops around Accumula Town to a strength Boulder that connects to Route 2 off the top of my head.

So story is linear, exploration is not. I love Gen 5

3

I have explored it fully, and I still think that it’s way more linear than LeafGreen, Emerald or HeartGold.

In the base game, it’s basically a ‘Poke-corridor’, you go from gym A to gym B. Even in something as old as LeafGreen (which is just Gen 1 remake), you were given the option to explore and pick gyms per your preference around the mid-game (IIRC after Cerulean), you could take on Koga, Sabrina and Erika in any order. That’s just LeafGreen, Emerald and HeartGold also had similar freedom.

Of course, compared to the linear story of Gen 5, even a small detour would look like a proper ‘exploration’ gameplay. But that’s not all there’s to exploration. Take one look at the maps for Kanto, Johto and Hoenn, you’ll see what I mean. Some cities had multiple entry points, HMs weren’t just for unlocking new areas but also for unlocking shortcuts. Emerald let me reach Sky Pillar before Wallace telling me to get there, I still needed to progress in the story to unlock it but at least I could reach the place. In Black 1, I can’t move an inch before some story event plays out. Pokemon Black 1 is good but it’s the weakest game amongst the 4 that I have played.